After our time in Northern Malawi we headed to southern Malawi to meet up with another team and make the trip down through Mozambique back to South Africa so we could finalize our Indian visas and make our way to India. The plan was to drive non-stop for two days and hopefully make it to Johannesburg on the morning of the third day.
After about 18 hours of driving the engine just stopped while we were driving so we pulled over to check everything out and there was no visible sign that we could see that anything was wrong…all the fluids were good so we waited about half an hour and then the car started right up again. Phew…..thought we were going to be stranded on the side of the road in Mozambique…that doesn’t sound like fun.
About an hour later the engine stopped again…’this is not good’ I thought. And it wasn’t…It was about midnight thirty or so and our truck wasn’t going anywhere. We made a few phone calls the guys checked under the hood to see if we could figure out what the problem was. No luck. So we saw some lights in the distance and praise the Lord we were at the top of the hill so we decided to push it to town. We got it rolling and took a running leap inside as the car rolled down the hill. We pushed it over a long bridge to a highway check point just after the bridge.
One of the officers working the checkpoint escorted Kelton and Caroline to the village mechanic’s house. At this time it’s about 2:00A.M.. They woke up the ‘village mechanic’ and told him our dilemma and he said he would be there to help us at 5:00am.
At about 6:00A.M our Mechanic showed up…that’s approximately 5:00AM Africa time. We pushed our truck over to his shop and he took it apart in about an hour. Of course you know how it goes when you get your car fixed…it starts out with a gasket and then your replacing the whole engine…so I guess we blew a few gaskets and wrecked a few pistons and maybe something else I don’t know but basically the whole engine needed to be replaced.
We had been in contact with the people that let us borrow the car and they contacted one of their ministry partners in Mozambique and asked him to come pick us up so we didn’t have to sleep on the side of the road in the car again. Someone had to stay with the car and the brave men Kelton and Matt said they would do the job. So Jaco came to our rescue and took all the girls to a camp site where another AIM team was having a little retreat. It just happened to be right on the coast and we got to play on the beach and go swimming in the Indian Ocean. Don’t tell the boys that though….they had to sit with the car all day and sleep in the car that night.. shhhhh….
That ‘Real Life Team’ that was already there took us in and cooked us dinner and we got cleaned up and got a good night sleep.
We eventually got the whole car thing taken care of and made it back in time to go to the ‘Brown Sugar’, a backpackers hostel, where our team was going to stay while we waited for our India visas. That wasn’t the end of the chaos though. That night at the Brown Sugar is one that I will surly never forget…..check out “Held up” coming soon…
